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London Town is Falling Down

The Anna Raccoon Archives

by Petunia Winegum on December 18, 2014

Doctor Samuel Johnson once provided a characteristically vivid description of some of the rather more…erm…slapdash construction work in London, painting a portrait of streets where ‘falling houses thunder on your head’, reflecting the fact that it was not uncommon in the eighteenth and nineteenth century for buildings to simply collapse without warning – a famous fate that befalls the Clennam household at the climax of Dickens’ ‘Little Dorrit’.

During the Blitz, the Luftwaffe gave hundreds of the capital’s buildings an almighty push and shove, but the post-war era has seen the redeveloper and handy little compulsory purchase orders accelerate the process. In the 1960s, this was done with a blatant disregard for public opinion, erasing such landmarks as the Euston Arch, the Billingsgate Corn Exchange and the St James’s Theatre, King Street. Following a growing public outcry that led to the birth of the conservation movement and successfully halted the planned redevelopment of Covent Garden in the 1970s, the redevelopers retreated back behind the scenes; but they haven’t gone away. They’re still at it.

This week, the bulldozers will descend on Earls Court Exhibition Centre, which – for all its faults – has been virtually the sole notable attraction in SW5 for over a century. Resident since 1887, the edifice underwent an Art Deco facelift in 1937 and has remained one of London’s finest examples of that whole architectural movement ever since. A true multi-purpose venue, Earls Court has hosted the likes of a rally for Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, the Ideal Home Exhibition and the Motor Show, events at the 1948 and 2012 Olympic Games, the Royal Tournament for fifty years, and the Brit Awards for ten. David Bowie was the first rock act to play at Earls Court, kicking-off the UK leg of his Aladdin Sane tour in 1973; although the acoustics at the gig were apparently appalling, the problem was hastily fixed and the venue soon became a premier fixture on the rock and pop circuit, with everyone from Led Zeppelin, Elton John, Queen and Slade to Oasis, The Arctic Monkeys, Morrissey, Take That and The Spice Girls adding it to their itinerary. But perhaps the most memorable concerts to be hosted at Earls Court were Pink Floyd’s legendary six nights of ‘The Wall’ in 1980. Not that such an impressive roster counts for much.

In July 2013, London Mayor Boris Johnson gave the go-ahead for the exhibition centre to be demolished and for the site to be redeveloped as…you guessed it…residential flats and retail outlets. Of course, such a scheme is not unique to the capital; major cities across the country are awash with riverside apartments and shopping centres that have sprung up over the past fifteen years like great glass blots on the landscape. But London has more to lose in that it has a greater proportion of outstanding, historic and iconic buildings than anywhere else in the UK and is also currently suffering from an acute affordable housing crisis. Will the residential flats scheduled to stand on the same location where Bowie Freaks flocked to kiss the hands of the Leper Messiah in 1973 be within the budgets of ordinary Londoners or will they provide further ‘holiday homes’ for Oligarchs that stand empty for half of the year?

Any regular reader of the ‘Nooks and Corners’ column in ‘Private Eye’ will be familiar with the sneaky tactics local councils employ to ensure profitable contracts from foreign property speculators and home-grown redevelopers triumph over the concerns of conservationists. First, a building is closed to the public; then it is allowed to descend into dereliction; then a mysterious fire always seems to break out, something that gives weight to council plans to demolish on health and safety grounds. The excuse is put forward that renovation would cost more than demolition and, hey presto, within a year or two the land is available for redevelopment. In the 1960s, they were less underhand; these days they have to use cunning to combat conservation.

In some respects, London has always been in a permanent state of transition; architecturally, it never sleeps and the litany of lost landmarks stretches back much further than the mania for redevelopment that characterised the first couple of decades after the Second World War. But lately it does sometimes feel as though the city is a grand old lady forever popping backwards and forwards to her cosmetic surgeon for endless injections of Botox she doesn’t really need. Were redevelopment restricted to housing the capital’s resident population in decent homes at reasonable rents or prices, most of it would be permissible; but all-too often, this is rarely the motivation behind such projects.

What falls beneath the wrecking-ball can also reflect what is or isn’t currently valued within architectural circles. In the 60s, anything Victorian – with beauty blackened and buried by a century of soot and smog – was fair game; today, it can be anything from pre-war Art Deco to 60s and 70s Brutalism that is viewed as undesirable and bereft of merit. Battersea Power Station, which appeared on the London skyline in the early 1930s like a giant’s upturned dining table, closed for business as far back as 1983, yet has remained one of the most recognisable constructions in the capital. Again, this is another London landmark boasting a musical connection, famously captured on the cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ LP with a flying pig overhead. But the unmistakable brick cathedral is not as intact or secure as it might seem from a distance.

The roof was removed in the late 80s during eventually aborted plans to convert the empty premises into a theme park, leaving it open to the elements and thus incurring substantial interior damage. Endless proposals and plans have since been put forward without success, but despite its Grade II Listed status, the building has been allowed to decay whilst consortiums, councils and corporations dither over what to do with it. Meanwhile, claims that the four chimneys have corroded beyond repair and would be better demolished and rebuilt have been contradicted by parties interested in the preservation of as much of the station as is feasibly possible. The latest scheme is spearheaded by a Malaysian company, legally bound to retain the exterior and chimneys, though such rules and regulations can be carefully circumnavigated by those who place profit over aesthetics.

Whatever kind of complex emerges in place of Earls Court Exhibition Centre – and I have a distinct feeling huge panes of glass will play a part in it – the loss of the venue itself will not even be compensated for by the materialisation of a strikingly fresh London landmark. Instead, we will be left with yet more apartments and outlets for the retail industry that will no doubt be indistinguishable from all the others that litter the London landscape. When the late, great architectural critic Ian Nairn railed against the increasing uniformity of what he called ‘Subtopia’ sixty years ago, he probably had no idea that the capital would eventually succumb to the same careless nonchalance and absence of imagination that had fatally transformed the provinces in his lifetime.

It would be nice to think the pop culture colossi who once bestrode the site won’t give up the ghost yet. Maybe one night in the not-too distant future, when a block of luxury residences in Earls Court are occupied for the summer term, Oleg and his third wife Natalia will be woken from their beauty sleep by the eerie echo of Mick Ronson strumming the riff for ‘The Jean Genie’; or a pistol fired by Buffalo Bill; or perhaps even Mel C challenging Liam Gallagher to ‘come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough’.

Presumably this is all driven by finance, so to understand it I guess you would have to follow the money. It was never apparent to me why they knocked down an old Wembley and built a new one a couple of hundred yards away, but presumably it had something to do with increasing issues of structural decay and more than likely increasing issues concerned with health, safety and the pursuit of insurance. Just a guess. I also wonder how much of Earl’s Court’s busness has been leached across London to the Dome and the likes of “Excel”, where I went to a commercial show once.

I think the Dome has definitely stolen a lot of Earls Court’s business; as far as I know (not that I’ve seen it for years), the Brits now takes place there. Oh, and we must also remember it is, of course, THE O2 ARENA. No new venue can actually be named after the location anymore. It has to be named after the corporate sponsor – and that applies to football stadia as well. A horrible trend that says a lot.

On one of our long ago trips to Thameside London we visited the power station turned into an art gallery. An amazing huge ex generator room with a glowing sun at the far end and a far high up mirror ceiling. Even sober citizens were flat on their backs on the floor. I joined them. I can remember an expensive art book stall and expensive cafeteria but nought else besides that glowing sun, the source of all our being. Was it art, I know not, but it reached me and a lot of other people. Since then various installations near this industry to art conversion are in place. A fancy bridge that caused a stir. A round theatre. An aerial runway. A giant turd for the mayor to Borisificate from. I came to London in 1951 aged 15 on a school trip by train. I recall being appalled by the rundown, dirty, fire weed strewn, bomb damaged vista before me. We went round the Dome of Discovery and viewed The Skylon and Shot Tower. The concrety concert hall etc. I wondered to myself whether it was worth the long drawn train journey from dirty, filthy, polluted but not bomb damaged Warrington, to awsomely awful damaged London. The reviled dome that followed in 2000, we visited just before closure. I was captivated. Triumphantly right, when it morphed into a pop venue that seems very successful. The arguments I had when I supported the dome! Good old Earlescourt, but it surely caused a lot of traffic hold ups for us to visit escapees to the west country. Lets hope that not too many oligarchs and greedy buy to let city slickers get in possession

I arrived to St Agnes Place in Kennington – just in time to spend my days watching the rats run riot as the bulldozers moved into what became the Aylesbury Estate. Camberwell Road, just round the corner became the focus of one of the first vocal ‘conservation groups’ – middle class intellectuals raving about the architecture. They won – the Victorian and Georgian houses were saved, to be renovated by the council as council homes instead of the planned extension of the ghastly Aylesbury estate. I made friends with many of the people who came to live in those gracious homes at council rents. I don’t remember any one of them being of the ‘poor people from the slums’ – one was secretary to the chairman of BP, two or three were social workers, (the new royalty in Brixton), the remainder worked for various politicians in Kremlin central as Brixton Town Hall was known. If anybody from the ‘swamp’, as it was called, ever made it to those superior dwellings expensively renovated – I never met them. People learn fast – and eventually St Agnes Place in its entirety was squatted by Rastafarians equally clamouring for these ‘fine examples’ of two up two downs to be ‘rescued’.St Agnes Place was not of the same quality as Camberwell Road and there appeared to be no middle class appetite to join the fight – eventually the council gave in hoping to rehouse ‘poor people from the slums’ there and gave all 20 or so properties to the Rastafarians – it is today the Bob Marley museum…… Clever Square was sold off by the council and nowadays is wall to wall MPs in multi million pound houses, happy to live just over the bridge from Westminster. About the only bit that was saved were the ‘pre-fabs’ on Newington Butts, apparently of great architectural merit – and I’ll bet my bottom dollar there are no VIPS wrangling permission to live in those. The solution was to double the size of the Aylesbury Estate, and stack the poor people even higher… 40 years later the process starts again, as the Aylesbury Estate is condemned as a slum – but meanwhile Dolphin Square, that brave experiment in giving the poor people of Westminster somewhere decent to live, has morphed into a ‘luxury mansion block containing no less than 11 MPS’ (including two Conservative MPs – very important that bit, far more important than the other 9 ‘patently not Conservative’ MPs!). Now that Earl’s Court is to be a luxury development for Chinese clothing manufacturers and Russian businessmen’s girlfriends – where are they going to stack all the poor people this time?

Not sure if you are being ironic or not but Dolphin Square was a commercial development which was never intended for either the poor or the rich. Until recently it was not considered to be a ‘luxury’ estate. I’ve known several people on modest salaries who lived there in the 1960s to 1980s and the rents were reasonable by central London standards.

Warrington’s changed a bit over the last two or three decades, too. Not many smoke-blackened old industrial buildings left now. Just the occasional nod to the past – is that rather attractive building with the lovely terracotta exterior that C and J Bent’s the architectural ironmongers occupied, isolated by Sainsbury’s carpark, still there on the corner of Church Street?

I worked for a brief period in the early1980’s in Peckham, and no word of a lie, this Sainsburys still existed as per this flickr!https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/8158277580/ It did not have all those staff and the goods were not as dramatically displayed, but the layout remained exactly like that picture… I swear to God…. Either that I fell through a wormhole back then. I recall being amazed even then because Sainsbury’s supermarkets were behemoths already by the 80’s. I walked into it once and then walked out again. I swear I even recognise the mosaic flooring. My visit would have been early 80’s and certainly not before 1979. I remember thinking that perhaps it was preserved on purpose but on a visit a few years later I went to find it and there was no trace of it any longer.

It boils down to what’s worse: local authority corruption, especially around anything involving the granting of planning permission (as variously reported in Private Eyes passim), or our peculiar obsession with preserving old buildings no matter how hideous, many of which were built for commercial or religious purposes that no longer apply.

I go to Liverpool fairly regularly and area around the main station is a bit odd. There is a Greek Temple off to one side, the station itself and an attached hotel (originally I assume). A little up the road is what I understand are the Museum and Art Gallery but across the road is some garishly decorated shopping centre of a very modern pedigree. Sometimes I have a little time in hand and perambulate around the streets and these old buildings are isolated islands in a confusing one-way traffic system that never envisaged anyone wanting to do somehting as old-fashioned as walking, and decrepit looking pubs and tatty old shops half-tumbling down. God knows what the place would look like if they hadn’t had the wit to keep those old buildings up to scratch, even if it is hard to imagine what the Greek Temple is used for nowadays… or what the heck it was for in the first place, come to that…

The redevelopment of that part of Liverpool was more down to the Luftwaffe than the council, landowners and developers. Quite a lot of the old Liverpool, with a lot of Georgian and Victorian buildings of very high quality, not to mention the docks area, got a right pasting in the early 1940s. A lot of it was still barely-cleared bomb-site in the late 1970s. It’s come on quite a bit over the last two decades.

As a very occasional visitor, and once even an exhibitor, at Earls Court/Olympia, they are no longer the right places for major exhibitions. The sheer logistics of shipping all the necessary materials and people to and from Central London make it one to avoid. Anything like that should now be somewhere outside the M25. As a venue for concerts, it could have a minor future but the competition is so much better. Saving the facade is not really important and would simply add cost and constraints to that large site’s future use. Buildings, like any other machines, become obsolete as time moves on, so it’s time to take lots of photographs, store the memories and to move on, using the site in a way more appropriate to the 21st century – whether that’s the Boris-mix is not for me to judge, but that’s what he’s elected and paid to do.

It depends what the site is used for, really. A new and original landmark is always welcome. For all its over-familiar glass exterior, I think the Shard is an astonishing addition to the London skyline. But the plans for Earls Court as they stand at the moment don’t seem to hint at that or somewhere, as Anna said, the ‘poor people’ can be rehoused.

Nobody lives in the Exhibition Centre surely? I cannot see how anyone will become anymore unhoused than they might be already.

I travelled from the south into Victoria recently and was astounded to see a very modern building that I can remember being built barely twenty years ago (maybe). It was for the Financial Times I think or some other notable publication. Anyhow, it was being torn down such a short time later. I’ve gathered from the web that “the turd” was built on that enormous empty patch of land next to Tower Bridge that I can remember walking across and wondering why such an enormous plot stood empty in such a place. Also, going into Victoria, there were some blocks of flats that I remember looking very “council house” in their 1950’s-looking brickery but now they all seem to have refurbished for the shiny new century. From the look of the hinterland between the blocks they look to still be occupied by the hoi-polloi. What an address to have!

“But London has more to lose in that it has a greater proportion of outstanding, historic and iconic buildings than anywhere else in the UK and is also currently suffering from an acute affordable housing crisis.”

Does London really have a greater proportion of outstanding, historic and iconic buildings than anywhere else in the UK?

If London has so much then surely it can withstand the lose of a single building better than the rest of the culturally deprived UK?

* is also currently suffering from an acute affordable housing crisis *

If there was no “affordable housing” and therefore no poor people living within easy rich then the oligarchs would have to clean their own toilets and then maybe they’d get fed up and move to Doncaster where the labour is amply provided-for… or perhaps house the Morlocks themselves, upstairs or downstairs to suit their oligarchian tastes. I wonder if the job of the council and the burden for the tax-payer, should be to ensure there is an ample supply of serfs for the nouveau rich.

Having played there and been to a concert at the O2, I can confirm that the accoustics were better at Earls Court. I shall miss the old place – I didn’t know they were knocking it down but then again I avoid London these days. It’s not what it was.

We moved from West Cornwall to North Kensington in 1962. My father was a railwayman and in those days one had to move depots in order to gain promotion from fireman to engine driver. The writing was on the wall by the late 1950s and my parents decided it was better to move to London than stay and face the railway being shut down all around you. They were correct. The branch lines that my father worked on were closed in the early 60s. He moved to Old Oak Common Depot and lodged in the hostel. Our name went on the list for a railway house. Yes- the railway provided houses for the staff to rent. Eventually we were given a house just off Ladbroke Grove (the cheap end- not the Notting Hill end). I was 13 and the eldest of 4. We settled into our new schools and I really enjoyed exploring the capital city by tube and bus. A Red Rover ticket cost 3/6d and I travelled the length and breadth of the London Transport system. Just along the road opposite the Pall Mall Depository there was a pocket park, lovingly tended by two uniformed park keepers who kept the grass cut, tended the immaculate flower beds and supervised the swings and roundabouts and large tarmacked area where we could ride our bikes in safety. It was a lovely part of London There was a pub at the top of the street. The Earl Percy I think- but everyone called it the cowshed. You may have seen pictures of it as it doubled for the exterior of the pub in Al Murray’s “Time Gentlemen Please”. in 1965 or 66 my father was offered the freehold to our house. It was £2600 and he thought it was a lot of money. We persuaded him to buy it but he felt it was a millstone around his neck. He never had a debt in his life. Sadly he died in 1983 and my mother sold up and moved away. She sold the house for £34,000. Out of curiosity I looked up our old house on a property website recently. Our little cul-de-sac consisted on 24 houses. The going price for these red brick and pebbledash terraced houses is a cool million pounds each. What’s more, the pub at the top of the street has been demolished and flats are being built. They are being advertised for between 800,000 and a million per flat. And the little pocket park where we used to play? That went years ago, replaced by a block of flats. And the ordinary working man? Where does he live?

Pubs closing and turning into housing is another issue. In this village there is a pub with a superb view, the best ‘tourist’ position – and hideously run down. When the land lord retired everyone cheered (silently, you don’t want to make enemies in a small village) and looked forward to the place being rejuvenated – it won’t happen, the landlords have put it back on the market at a ridiculously high rent that no one can get anywhere near. Even one of the breweries fought shy of trying to find that sort of money. We can guess what will happen – after a year or so of being a ‘blot on the landscape’ – they will apply for change of use on the grounds that it is ‘unwanted in the community’ – and it will be turned into luxury housing for second homers.

I expect the “pop culture colussi” will rush to the buildings aid, it being an architectural “gem” and-all. Perhaps it could be renamed the Princess Di centre of futile gestures being as she was a great patron of the genre. Until and unless some group actually comes up with some money then the monstrosity deserves its fate.

The father (94) of a friend of mine has lived in Richmond since the 60s. A bungalow on a half acre plot. Worth well over £1m now. The owners of the house opposite wanted to knock down and rebuild a single house on their site. Council wanted to charge them £60,000 for the loss of Council Tax as in their opinion the site could accommodate 3 houses.

“Although the acoustics at the gig were apparently appalling, the problem was hastily fixed”. I don’t think so, as I remember seeing Led Zeppelin at Earls Court, back in 1975 and the acoustics were still dreadful!

I’ve never liked the place, and when CAMRA started holding the Great British Beer Festival there, it was reason enough for me to stop going. The place had all the atmosphere, and appeal, of an underground car-park! I for one, won’t miss it, even if the building does have an art-deco facade.